I will do as you prescribe, said
Aristophanes, and now get on.
Eryximachus spoke as follows: Seeing that Pausanias made a fair beginning,
and but a lame ending, I must endeavour to supply his deficiency. I think
that he has rightly distinguished two kinds of love. But my art further
informs me that the double love is not merely an affection of the soul of
man towards the fair, or towards anything, but is to be found in the bodies
of all animals and in productions of the earth, and I may say in all that
is; such is the conclusion which I seem to have gathered from my own art of
medicine, whence I learn how great and wonderful and universal is the deity
of love, whose empire extends over all things, divine as well as human.
And from medicine I will begin that I may do honour to my art. There are
in the human body these two kinds of love, which are confessedly different
and unlike, and being unlike, they have loves and desires which are unlike;
and the desire of the healthy is one, and the desire of the diseased is
another; and as Pausanias was just now saying that to indulge good men is
honourable, and bad men dishonourable:--so too in the body the good and
healthy elements are to be indulged, and the bad elements and the elements
of disease are not to be indulged, but discouraged.
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